For nearly 20 years, Art Dubai has been one of the pillars around which the region’s cultural scene has grown.
Now, in a moment of regional uncertainty, the fair is being carried forward by that same ecosystem: galleries that build their calendars around it, collectors who asked for it to continue, institutions that developed alongside it and artists whose visibility has grown through the platforms it helped create.
“This is something we’re doing together as a community,” Benedetta Ghione, executive director of Art Dubai Group, tells The National.
“It is not the fair we had planned. But the spirit of Art Dubai, and what really matters about it, absolutely comes through. In a way, it has been distilled into an even more pure and visible form.”
The adapted edition, taking place at Madinat Jumeirah from May 15 to 17, is smaller than the original April fair, but still substantial in scale.
“At the heart of Art Dubai, there has always been this idea of building a platform and a gathering moment that would garner international attention,” Ghione says.
“But equally important was building roots, using the platform as an engine, not as a circus that pops up and goes away and comes back the following year.
“The ability to move ahead with an adapted edition comes from exactly that. It comes from exhibitors who have been with us for years, if not decades, and for whom the fair is a critical and sustaining commercial force,” she continues.
When the fair launched in 2007, it was called Gulf Art Fair. Dubai’s art scene was taking shape around a relatively small number of galleries, collectors and institutions, while the wider region still lacked a major international fair. Its founders, John Martin and Ben Floyd, saw that absence as an opening.
“When I came to Dubai, it struck me that there are 600 art fairs around the world and not one in the Middle East,” Floyd said in 2007.
Martin, a London gallerist, saw Dubai’s geography as part of the proposition. By 2008, after Gulf Art Fair had been renamed Art Dubai, much of the work was still in raising awareness globally.
“A lot of our job is getting international collectors and press coming to the fair,” he told The National at the time.
In those early years, the duo saw Dubai as a place where art markets that often moved separately could be brought into the same conversation.
“We seem to be attracting more and more people from a hugely wide geography,” Martin said in 2008. “It gave Indian galleries the chance to meet American collectors, and European galleries to meet collectors from Russia and the Far East. This is a great meeting point for people to come together into a dialogue.”
Ghione was not part of the team in the first years, but she sees that original impulse as central to what the fair has become.
“The beginning story is John and Ben,” she says. “The seed of that story has remained very much in our DNA: seeing Dubai as a place of opportunity.”
As the city changed, the fair changed with it. More galleries opened, collectors became more engaged and institutions developed, while artists from the region began to receive wider attention after years of being left out of the international canvas.
“There was this driving force of being in dialogue with our city and with the opportunities it represents,” Ghione says. “The other through line has been a constant concern with how we make this relevant. How do we not become just another art fair?
“Evolving as the city has evolved, and becoming a centre of discovery where you can see art from all over the world under one roof, has been critical.”
Over time, the fair’s work expanded beyond the booths. Global Art Forum gave a public platform for debate and ideas. Campus Art Dubai supported artists and cultural practitioners through education and mentorship.
Art Dubai Modern created space for long-underappreciated modern art from the Middle East, Africa and South Asia. The Dubai Collection brought privately held works into a public framework.
“There has been a constant sense of acknowledging the structural needs and investing in them along the way,” Ghione says.
Programmes grew as the UAE’s wider cultural infrastructure expanded, from Sharjah’s institutions and Alserkal Avenue to Jameel Arts Centre, Louvre Abu Dhabi, Barjeel Art Foundation and the forthcoming Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. Around them, the local scene became increasingly able to frame its own histories, rather than waiting for recognition to arrive from elsewhere.
Nurturing the rise of Arab art
International interest in Arab art has grown, but Ghione says the understanding remains uneven, especially around modern and contemporary histories that have long existed outside the dominant art-world map.
Art Dubai has been one of the places where that reassessment has taken visible form. Through its contemporary gallery programme and Art Dubai Modern, the fair has helped bring artists such as Etel Adnan, Dia Al Azzawi, Samia Halaby, Mounirah Mosly, Adam Henein, Maliheh Afnan and Moustafa Fathi in front of collectors, galleries and institutions in a distinctly regional context, placing them centrally within a broader story that had too often been treated as peripheral.
“I don’t think any artistic movement would want to be understood only through an outside eye and outside validation,” says Ghione.
“There is still incredibly uneven representation internationally. There are still very few institutions focused solely on Modern and Contemporary Arab art, and there is still a complete lack of understanding that this is not a recent discovery,” she continues.
“When you look at work from the 1940s and 1950s, it was present in dialogue and wired into the global conversation – not following someone else, but running in parallel tracks, or sometimes ahead of western counterparts. I don’t think we’ve scratched the surface of telling those stories.”
That work is far from complete, but Art Dubai has helped create the conditions in which more of it can happen from within the region. Through the fair, its programmes and the institutions it has worked alongside, galleries and artists have found routes into wider conversations that were once hard to access.
“It’s been the fair that has catapulted a lot of galleries on to the international circuit,” Ghione says. “It has also been a moment of rediscovery for practitioners and artists who didn’t get there the first time around because the platform didn’t exist.”
A reimagined fair
As the fair moved from a special edition planned long in advance to a special edition assembled around the demands of the moment, the conversations became more practical.
Dunja Gottweis, director of Art Dubai Fair, says the team first spoke to galleries, collectors and partners about whether an adapted fair should happen at all.
“There was so much support, but also the wish for us to go ahead with something, to show resilience and to continue to be a platform,” Gottweis says.
“What struck me is how many galleries feel committed to Art Dubai. They feel like this is their fair, whether they’re from the UAE or beyond. Gallery representatives were saying: 'We want to be part of this. We want to show up. We need this in the region.'”
The original 2026 fair had been expected to include about 110 presentations. The special edition will have more than 45 presentations, most of them drawn from the galleries already accepted for the original fair.
The terms had to change as well. Gottweis says Art Dubai returned booth fees to galleries to help with cash flow, then introduced a risk-sharing model similar to the one it used during the pandemic. Galleries that did not want to take part this year could roll their participation over to 2027.
“If you sell a work, half of the revenue goes to us and the rest you keep until the booth fee is paid off,” she says.
For the galleries that remained, the question became what could be brought, what could be made here and what felt right for this moment.
“In a moment like this, you pivot to something that is meaningful, but also logistically possible,” Gottweis says. “You have to look at both.”
A community-built programme
The wider programme has also been shaped around gathering. It will include a major presentation from the Dubai Collection, a curated exhibition from Barjeel Art Foundation, moving image works with Alserkal Avenue and the 20th Global Art Forum. Large-scale installations will be placed across the site, including works by Khalid Al Banna, Rashid Bin Shabib and Ahmed Bin Shabib, Kevork Mourad and Sudarshan Shetty.
Alexie Glass-Kantor, executive director of curatorial at Art Dubai Group, says the programme was rebuilt around the idea of “things we do together”.
“We’ve had to reimagine Art Dubai from beginning to end,” she says. “It’s a different moment, a different time.”
With free entry supported by Dubai Culture, the fair will also be opened more widely to the public. “We want people to come and spend time with the galleries and the community,” Glass-Kantor says. “We want them to feel welcome.”
That sense of gathering sits alongside the commercial fragility behind cultural production. Many galleries make more than half of their annual turnover during the fair, Glass-Kantor says, while many artists supported through the platform come from places heavily affected by the current situation.
“Culture is often one of the first things to get hit in a crisis, but it’s what people turn to for recovery,” she says. “It’s what people turn to for education, language, continuity, renewal and healing. Supporting culture through circumstances of transformation is really important.”
That is something Art Dubai has been building towards for 20 years. Around that market, it has helped build programmes, audiences, careers and habits of gathering that now extend well beyond the fair week.
“Ultimately, we have grown with our city,” Ghione says. “Art Dubai has Dubai in it, and as a platform and a programme, it will only be as good as our cultural scene.
“There are very few contexts where a private enterprise born as a commercial vehicle would have been able to work with such longevity in the non-commercial field, and affect change in the way our programmes have.”
In May, that history will be visible in a fair reshaped by the network around it.
“This is not a decision made in a silo by people in a meeting room,” Ghione says. “The decision to go ahead came from constant consultation and co-thinking with our partners, galleries, institutions and collectors.
“In the end, there is this feeling that this thing is everyone’s thing. And on that basis, it is taking place.”
Art Dubai is at Madinat Jumeirah from May 15 to 17
